However, he said there is general consensus that the data and computing service infrastructure underpinning the project will combine existing and new resources. Manish Parashar, director of NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and co-chair of the task force, told Protocol it’s too early to know whether or how private sector cloud providers might be involved. Plus, it had flow charts: One chart featured an AI technology stack built from Microsoft services including the Azure Open Data repository and Azure Machine Learning. Microsoft didn’t shy away from the sales opportunity either.
Sometimes AWS even ventured into sales-deck territory: “The AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure the NAIRR to deploy application workloads across the globe in a single click,” and its pre-trained AI services “can provide ready-made intelligence,” the company wrote. “As a leading cloud service provider, AWS’s compute, storage, AI/ML, and data analytics services can form the backbone of NAIRR’s shared research infrastructure,” noted the company. Meanwhile, Amazon used the task force’s request for information as an opportunity to pitch its AI and cloud products and services. “Building a new platform from the ground up would require a huge investment of dollars and expertise, and even once built would not have the advantages brought by the scale of existing Cloud providers.” The company highlighted the “security, operational, and energy efficiency” benefits of partnering with the cloud experts rather than building in-house. “We believe the NAIRR should be a multi-cloud hosting platform for commercial Cloud resources (as opposed to a new Cloud platform developed by government or academia),” wrote Google, which, as the underdog of the Big Cloud triad, has the most to gain from playing nice with the competition in a multi-cloud setup. The push for strong commercial tiesĪll three companies also emphasized the benefits of constructing the research resource on a foundation enabled by commercial cloud providers as opposed to something built by the federal government. In the end, the project could reap dividends for the AI and cloud industry when it comes to fueling data sources, educating the next generation of much-desired tech talent and spurring increased interest in cloud and AI services from the public sector. The other two cloud giants, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, did not propose specific dollar figures, but both companies are eager to get in on the action.Īnd, although the companies engage in bruising competition to attract enterprise cloud customers, AWS, Google and Microsoft each indicated some willingness to work together to support the initiative. It’s in the early stages of planning through a process led by the National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.īecause of its focus on large-scale AI, which requires huge datasets and tons of storage and computational capacity, the resource by its nature is likely to involve the top cloud providers. In a previously unreported bold proposal submitted in October to the federal task force overseeing the project, Google stated, “In order to achieve significant impact, we recommend that the fund the resource at $500 million/year or more.” The resource is meant to be a repository of data, AI tools and access to computing power necessary for researchers to develop machine learning and other AI systems. If the company has its way, the proposed funding would not just create a new contract for Google Cloud, it could benefit other divisions under the Alphabet umbrella including its urban tech unit Sidewalk Labs.
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